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Update on my M&P malfunction...this is encouraging!!!

4K views 20 replies 10 participants last post by  greener 
#1 ·
I posted about a trigger disconnect problem I had at about the 300 round mark. The trigger just disconnected. Even after many helpful thoughts in my original thread, I'm still not sure why it happened, but...



Since then I have put 700 more rounds through it without a single mal of any kind, and I STILL HAVEN'T CLEANED IT, not once since I got it I now have a total of 1020 rounds through it. Although, I must admit that the guilt about not cleaning it is starting to get to me.



It would appear, as I and others suspected, that this was a one-time, 'fluke'. Maybe a piece of flashing from the frame, who knows. But, it's running great now.
 
#3 ·
I am not sure where this "And I still haven't cleaned it yet" thinking comes from in regards to firearms. Firearms are tools and most professionals in whatever profession they may be in take care of their tools. Why do we treat firearms differently? I think tests that stress a weapon are a good thing while the manufactuer is coming up with a new design. I think finding out how many rounds a particular style of weapon, say the AR family can shoot before malfunctions start showing up is also a good thing. Our brave young men and women using these in places far away need that info, and also to know a few shots of CLP in various key locations will probably get it up and running again till it can be cleaned and lubed properly. We as play shooters, CCW holders and even police officers are never going to be in a situation that we can say I am sure glad I found out at round 750 without any maintenace my gun is going to start giving me problems.
 
#4 ·
It's his gun, if he doesn't want to clean it after every shooting don't tell him what can go wrong or what can come up. WHO CARES??!!!??!?! Instead of worring about what can go wrong why dont you say something constructive such as "It gets to me if I don't clean my gun because I worry of any type of malfunction during a time of need."
 
#5 ·
UPSguy,



I'm not trying to see how long it will go without cleaning. I had a problem that may have been related to debris accumulation. So I figured if debris caused the problem, more debris would make it show up more frequently. It hasn't shown up again, and now I have the utmost confidence that this thing is fixed.



Plus, it also shows me that it doesn't have to be sparkling clean to operate perfectly - that's valuable knowledge. I don't think I have ever let more than 300 rounds go through a gun without cleaning it, but in this case, since I had the problem, I wanted to know if this gun would work reliably, dirtier than it'll ever be from here on.



I was shocked to hear an IDPA champion challenge me that I was cleaning my gun too often. I was at his shooting school and was cleaning it every day. We were shooting about 300 rounds a day.



At Blackwater the lead instructor runs thousands of rounds through his comp Glock before he cleans it and he's an incredible shot.



I'm not saying guns shouldn't be cleaned, I think they should to minimize abrasive wear if nothing else. But during the time I was shooting this 1020 rounds, I was literally bathing the slide rails with Lucas gun oil, so it wasn't running dry or anything like that.
 
#7 ·
This is gettin' embarassing now. I now have 1220 rounds through my M&P - no problems whatsoever. What's embarrassing is I still haven't cleaned it.



It was my honest intention to clean it at the 800 round mark, but time and opportunity just hasn't been there.
 
#9 ·
Guys, I know how long it takes to clean a gun. I know how to clean a gun. I think some of you worry too much. I've built 5 1911s from scratch, shot thousands of rounds through them and actually cleaned them!



When I said I meant to clean it at the 800 round mark I meant 800 rounds past the malfunction point which happened at around 300 rounds. My bad, I realize I didn't say that at all, but that's what I meant. So last night, I reached the 1100+ round count and meant to clean it when I got home, but my wife and I had some errands to run and when I got back home I had completely forgotten about it.



Then, today, I had a break this afternoon so I decided to go shooting and it dawned on me I didn't clean my gun last night. Well, I'm in good clothes, the range doesn't have a cleaning station, and I didn't have any cleaning stuff with me. So I thought I'd just wait and shoot after I cleaned it, but I quickly decided, to heck with that! If it won't go 1200 rounds without cleaning, I'll start carrying my 92FS or Glock, I know they will.



Soooo, when I got back from the range today I had reached the 1220 round mark and posted that.



I have to say that it has been very interesting and rewarding to personally see my M&P perform so well for 1200 rounds. When the trigger mysteriously disconnected one time at 300 rounds, I lost all confidence in it. IF that occurred because I didn't clean it 'out of the box', and I knew that for sure, I would have sold it. I'm sorry, but I've never cleaned a gun 'out of the box' and I've never had a problem. So if the M&P is not reliable straight out of the box, I don't want it. I expect more of a gun than that. Plus, isn't every gun fired before it leaves the factory? This mild endurance test, 1200 rounds through a gun without cleaning is NOT a torture test by any means, has completely restored my confidence in it and I've all but forgotten the single malfunction I had very early on.



I plan to clean it tomorrow, which will bring an interesting experiment to a close, and from there it is highly unlikely that it'll go more than 300 rounds or so without cleaning. I average shooting about 150 rounds a week. I've already shot 200 rounds this week, and the week ain't over.



I don't intend to start cleaning it every time I shoot it - it just isn't necessary. Last May when I took the Level II Handgun course at Blackwater, we shot nearly 500 rounds plus a day and I only cleaned my 92FS at the end of the day. But it would not have concerned me if I missed a day. Now if I shot 100 rounds through it and knew I wouldn't shoot it again for a month or so, it'd get cleaned shortly after I shot it.
 
#12 ·
The M&P is being sold as a tactical pistol. it should be able to take a great deal of shooting under dirty conditions. I guess that it would last longer in better condition and function more reliably if it were cleaned rnd lubed egularly. I'd rather maintain mine regulary and not think about whether it will fire the next time I pull the trigger. 10-15 minutes cleaning every couple of weeks doesn't seem like a big deal.
 
#13 ·
I change the oil in my car every 3000 miles, give or take a hundred miles or so. I don't 'clean' my car everytime I drive it or every time it rains. If I drive my car on a 1000 mile trip, I don't change the oil when I get back unless it coincides with the 3000 mile oil change.



I suppose that it could be claimed that a car would last longer if the oil were changed every 2000 miles, etc., after all "it's cheap insurance". But we all pretty much know that isn't true.



I know of no study, no evidence, not even a hint of evidence that says a gun cleaned every 100 rounds will last any longer and/or will be more accurate than one only cleaned every 1000 rounds. I do know of some tests where accuracy was measured before and after thousands of rounds without cleaning and the accuracy was better after the shooting than it was before. I don't know how to explain that, I am for sure not saying it is wrong to clean guns regularly and frequently; I'm just saying the guys I know that shoot a lot, don't clean as much as we'd think, and the guys that don't shoot a lot seem to be almost paranoid about it.



I don clean my guns regularly, but not every time I shoot them. I'm ok with cleaning after about 500 rounds, or about every two weeks, which ever one comes first and depending on conditions. I shoot almost every week and average about 200 rounds a week.



An example, I go to the range Monday afternoon and shoot 100 rounds. I'm planning to shoot another 100 on Thursday and another 100 on Friday. I clean my gun Saturday.



If I shoot 200 rounds and I have to be out of town or for what ever reason I won't be able to shoot for a week, I clean it.
 
#14 ·
Tangle said:
...I know of no study, no evidence, not even a hint of evidence that says a gun cleaned every 100 rounds will last any longer and/or will be more accurate than one only cleaned every 1000 rounds. I do know of some tests where accuracy was measured before and after thousands of rounds without cleaning and the accuracy was better after the shooting than it was before. I don't know how to explain that, I am for sure not saying it is wrong to clean guns regularly and frequently; I'm just saying the guys I know that shoot a lot, don't clean as much as we'd think, and the guys that don't shoot a lot seem to be almost paranoid about it.


People that maintain their guns regularly, religiously... however you want to classify it, dont do so to increase accuracy. I know that I dont. I seriously doubt that I would even notice any accuracy changes when shooting COM at 10 yds.



While there is no study of changes in accuracy due to cleaning, there is plenty of evidence either empirical, anecdotal or personal proving that clean guns are more reliable than filthy guns. I am one of those whose maintenance priority is weapons, feet and stomach.



With that said I am not going to go into a panic if I dont have time to clean my gun after a couple of hundred round range session. Will I let my guns go 1K+ without cleaning, Hell no. Do I clean my guns every morning or every month or every quarter even if they arent used. Not unless I happen to be in a combat zone, in which case I would inspect and clean if necessary before breakfast and before dinner time allowing. For every day stuff in urban America, if I havent used my gun in a week or so I give it a good visual inspection. Rails still lubed, feed ramps clean, no lint or crap anywhere.... and go on with life.
 
#15 ·
UPSguy said:
I am not sure where this "And I still haven't cleaned it yet" thinking comes from in regards to firearms. Firearms are tools and most professionals in whatever profession they may be in take care of their tools. Why do we treat firearms differently? I think tests that stress a weapon are a good thing while the manufactuer is coming up with a new design. I think finding out how many rounds a particular style of weapon, say the AR family can shoot before malfunctions start showing up is also a good thing. Our brave young men and women using these in places far away need that info, and also to know a few shots of CLP in various key locations will probably get it up and running again till it can be cleaned and lubed properly. We as play shooters, CCW holders and even police officers are never going to be in a situation that we can say I am sure glad I found out at round 750 without any maintenace my gun is going to start giving me problems.


Frankly, as a competitive shooter, I NEED to know how many rounds my gun will shoot before things start acting funny. Not to mention if you shoot a lot, it mensa cleaning a lot. You do a lot of shooting fast, and you can actually start to anneal the barrel. Which now means those harsh chemicals and bronze brushes might not actually be good for a bore. You really think somehting that can dissolve copper on contact is all that great for a barrel? I'd rather not put it through one every few hundred rounds.



Kind of like a car, you might change your oil every 3000, but you don't do the same to your transmission fluid, which you probably only need every 30,000. And frankly if you want to, it's your money. And If i don't want, it's my car.



Why do some people feel obliged to insist that something is the way I should be doing something? Do you oil your hammer up and wrap it in a nice silicone cloth then put it in a vaccuum bag when you are done using it? No? But why don't you take proper care of your tools?
 
#16 ·
I think some may have misunderstood or taken wrong what I wrote. Easy to do on the internet reading, if we were speaking face to face things are usaully different. wasn't really even blasting the origianl poster. there seems to be this great badge of honor type thing by saying my gun has worked and i haven't cleaned it in 15000 rounds. That is nice but truly means nothing. I also shoot competitively. If the highest round count I am going to encounter at a match is 300 rounds it really doens't matter that I am can shoot 1500 rounds with no issues, that is way past 300. If I am going to be taking a 3 day class and have an 1800 round minimun requirement for ammo, that means I need to be able to go 600 rounds at most. But, many do run a bore snake through the barrel and relube a few key points during a lunch break. I have done torture tests on my own weapons, I have done high round counts with no maintenance too as I want to know the same limits as many others. The original poster later stated he had not initially cleaned his M&P, very well might have been were the malfunction came from.
 
#17 ·
TAZ said:
...While there is no study of changes in accuracy due to cleaning, there is plenty of evidence either empirical, anecdotal or personal proving that clean guns are more reliable than filthy guns. I am one of those whose maintenance priority is weapons, feet and stomach.


I see it just the opposite, some personal examples:

I was at a shooting school owned and operated by a guy who won an IDPA National Championship. After watching me and another guy clean our guns every day, he walks over and says, "Guys don't you think you're over doing the cleaning thing a bit? He was serious. This comes from a guy that probably shoots 25,000 or more rounds a year. Now he doesn't shoot all that without cleaning, but he doesn't clean nearly as much as one would think a top competitor would.



Then, some 'feds' used his range to shoot 13,000 rounds through a Sig 229 without cleaning it. The only problem they had was the decocker lever broke. No amount of cleaning would have prevented that.



I've read of tests where they evaluated the accuracy of a gun before and after shooting thousands of rounds through it without cleaning it and it was actually slightly more accurate afterwards.



Then I had an instructor at another big name school that shot a Glock competitively with the likes of Rob Leatham et al. He openly stated a Glock would easily go 5000 rounds without cleaning, and it was pretty clear he doesn't clean his gun all that often.



Then there's my M&P. This is the most I have ever shot a gun without cleaning it - 1220 rounds. I do keep it lubed, most would say I over lube. But I like what raz-0 said, "I NEED to know how many rounds my gun will shoot before things start acting funny." Well, I want to know that too.



Today will be the third time I've shot this week so I do shoot a lot, between 10,000 - 12,000 rounds a year. While I have no problem with cleaning a gun every time it's shot, I'll probably never do that. But I am seeing more and more evidence that while it may not hurt anything, guns really don't need to be cleaned as much as we've been led to believe.
 
#18 ·
In the end I think it all comes down to personal preference. If youre comfortable with your cleaning routine they by all means stick with it. I look at it as a 10 minute insurance policy. I know for a fact that cleaning my guns the way that I do does not decrease their reliability. I also know for a fact that not cleaning them will eventually induce a failure of some sort. The peace of mind I have from taking the 10 minutes to clean is time well spent for me.
 
#19 ·
As a lst resort

The M&P manual recommends cleaning before first use; barrel, breach, extractor areas that have been subject to powder/primer residue after each use; and field stripping and cleaning after sustained use. S&W is very likely being overly cautious about cleaning, but I assume they know a little bit about their products. I do not clean my pistol after each use religiously. I also find it simpler to field strip the pistol so I can inspect it, and cleaning is easier. I do, however, make it a practice to clean about every other time I shoot. I'm not interested in counting rounds fired, so I can only estimate the number of rounds fired at each session.



When I go to the range, the last thing I want is any of the firearms I take to give me problems because they haven't been cleaned. More importantly, the M&P and a .357 revolver stay loaded at home. If I ever have a need for them, the last thing I want to worry about is a cleanliness related malfunction this year, next year or in 2017 if I still have them. If spending a few minutes a month and a few bucks a year on cleaning supplies will give me the feeling that I don't have to worry about that, it seems cheap.



The M&P is probably designed to fire dependably in very dirty conditions and long intervals (time and rounds) between cleaning. But heck, a few minutes of attention every now and then, couldn't hurt.
 
#20 ·
TAZ said:
I also know for a fact that not cleaning them will eventually induce a failure of some sort. The peace of mind I have from taking the 10 minutes to clean is time well spent for me.


UPSguy said:
there seems to be this great badge of honor type thing by saying my gun has worked and i haven't cleaned it in 15000 rounds.

*SNIP*

I also shoot competitively. If the highest round count I am going to encounter at a match is 300 rounds it really doens't matter that I am can shoot 1500 rounds with no issues, that is way past 300.


Yeah, not cleaning them will result in a failure. However it is NOT a 10 minute process if you shoot a lot. It also isn't necessarily badge of honor, but just something you know from practical need. Because not everyone just shows up and shoots.





First off, the gun isn't the only thing you ahve to clean. You have to clean the mags too. ESPECIALLY if you get any carbon build up on them like you can in a 1911. Each mag takes about 4-5 minutes unless it has stubborn buildup anywhere, then it is about 7-8.



then you have rifles and shotguns, which are not 10 minute jobs if done right, especially the !@!(@#*!@((* shotguns.



During the busy season, I may have shot enough that I've got the following invenory to apply TLC to. This is a typical June, the worst month for me.



1 1911 about 350 rds

7 mags



1 M&P about 800-900 rds

7 mags



1 AR about 200 rds

5 mags



1 shotgun about 80 rds



1 buckmark about 200rds

4 mags



1 10/22 no less than 200 rds, but can be as much as 2500 rounds depending on how many people wind up using it.

5 mags (NOT 5 minute job each, try more like 10-15)





Assuming everything started clean, which is a BIG assumption, if I did them all at the end of the month, that'd be about 90 minutes for cleaning the guns, and about 2 hours for all the magazines.



If I cleaned the guns used after every match, that'd be at LEAST 205 minutes speant cleaning guns and mags assuming I didn't participate in any side-matches with centerfire pistols.



Knowing when things fail, given how much I shoot them, I know I need to clean my 10/22 mags once a year, my 10/22 twice a year, my shotgun only about twice a year, my ar 2-3 times a year depending on number of side-matches, My M&P mags and pistol about every two months, my 1911 once a year, my 1911 mags once a year, my buckmark once a year, and my buckmark mags about once every two years.



Given that in that same month I have to design at least one stage, do 3 days of dedicated ROing, 2 days of dedicated match setup, spend about 20 hours "shooting" matches where I'll do setup, teardown, run the timer, and score. Then there is at LEAST anoth 2 hours of score entry, calculation, and posting. Given that I'm one of the more active volunteers, doing the anal-retentive cleaning between stages or every night just isn't happening. There is no "between stages", and at night I go home, fall over, and sleep like I'm dead.



On top of THAT, I have to load all the centerfire pistol ammo. About 4-5 hours minimum.





And that's jsut the shooting stuff. I don't get paid for any of that. Real life takes time too, and frankly, there's only 7 days in a week.



<- my wife when I start scheduling June each year

:roll: <- me somewhere around the 9th of june wonderng why the heck I keep on doing all this.





Tactically speaking, only cleaning guns when they become too nasty, or are going to become unreliable averages out to about one dinner or a movie with the wife per month. Which keeps her form looking like
 
#21 ·
Finding time to do everything I want and keeping "she-who-must-be-obeyed" from grimacing is quite a balancing act for me. Keeping the grimace factor to a minimum sometimes takes quite an effort, especially if I want to do the really important things like shoot and fish. I've settled into a routine that makes gun, boat, car, tackle and yard maintenance not much of pain.



One war story on gun cleaning. A couple of weeks ago at the range, a father was trying to teach his son the elements of shooting (something apparently the Navy didn't do). He was shooting a Kimber Ultra Carry. Whether it was ammo or gun cleanliness, you had to push the slide to get the round to fully chamber. They were having enough of a fit with the Kimber that I let them use my M&P and a couple of my .22's. I fired 5 rounds from the Kimber. It looked like it needed cleaning. This guy apparently carried that pistol regularly. He had a nice carry holster and when he came on the range it was in his belt. In an "I need it" situation, I hope the first round would do the job, because the second round might take a bit of effort to get off. Some TLC would have gone a long way.
 
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